The Woman Under the Oaks: Mrs. Lasley Photographs Yung See San Fong
Sometime in the early 1930s, a Los Gatos woman named Evelyn Lasley stopped her car near the foot of Cypress Way, walked a little way up the driveway, and set up a camera under the big coast live oaks. The picture she made that day is soft and dreamlike, closer to a painting than a snapshot. A dirt drive curves past a leaning oak trunk, a low white gate catches the light, and behind a bank of shrubs and stone the roofs of a most unusual house sweep upward in tier after tier, like something lifted out of a Chinese scroll.
The house was Yung See San Fong, “Young’s Home in the Heart of the Hills.” Sanborn Young, a gentleman farmer, conservationist, and later a state senator, completed it in 1917 with his wife, Ruth Comfort Mitchell, the Los Gatos-born author whose novels and poems made her one of the town’s best-known citizens. They painted it green with red trim, filled it with pets with names like Gow Moy and Lo Lo Mi, and made it a fixture of local life for decades. The photograph Evelyn Lasley took of it is believed to be the second-oldest known image of the house, and it sits today in the Los Gatos Library’s local history collection under the plain catalog credit “Photographer Mrs. M. L. Lasley.”
Behind those three initials is a story that runs through half a century of Los Gatos life, and it starts with a camera counter in a drugstore three hundred miles north.
The Lasleys came from Blue Lake, a mill town in Humboldt County. Clinton C. Lasley was the town druggist there, first as half of Marvin & Lasley, Druggists in the 1890s, then under his own name as C. C. Lasley, Druggist and Stationer. His newspaper advertisements in 1899 offered something newly fashionable alongside the headache powders: cameras and photograph supplies. The next year the Blue Lake Advocate carried a small notice that says a great deal about the household: “Mrs. Lasley will open her Photograph Gallery about January 1st.” Rose Lasley, Clinton’s wife, ran her own photography studio in Blue Lake at the turn of the century, a generation before the picture on this page was made. When the family moved south to Los Gatos around 1911, they brought that habit of seeing with them. Clinton went to work as a pharmacist at George Green’s drugstore on Main Street, and the family settled into the house at 104 University Avenue that still appears in the library’s photo collection.
Clinton’s son Marvin grew up to be an outdoorsman of the old school. “Marvin Lasley Home From Hunting Trip” was news fit for the San Jose Mercury’s Los Gatos column in 1917, and he appears, rifle-company casual, in a hunting party photograph preserved in the library’s Shore family scrapbooks. In 1924 he married Evelyn Bently, and she stepped into a family where a camera was as ordinary a tool as a mortar and pestle. She also stepped into the town itself. Over the following sixty years Evelyn Lasley hosted children’s picnics, ran publicity for the PTA, served as president of the Los Gatos Business and Professional Women’s Club, and worked with the United Methodist Women well into the 1980s. Her daughters Norma and Marilyn smile out of University Avenue School class photos from the late 1930s. Yet in the library’s entire collection of nearly five thousand local history images, this view of Yung See San Fong is the only photograph that carries her name. She left one picture, and she made it count.
How did she come to be standing in the Youngs’ driveway? The family’s daily geography offers a good answer. In 1937 Marvin won the county contract to carry mountain schoolchildren down to the Lexington school at Alma and to Los Gatos High, buying two seven-passenger cars to cover Aldercroft Heights, Chemeketa Park, Holy City, Redwood Estates, and the rest of the canyon settlements. Maybe they also looked at Mireval (later renamed Cypress Way). The old Santa Cruz Highway was the Lasleys’ working landscape, driven twice a day, in all seasons. Another route could have been this winding road. Or the two households had more in common than a road. Sanborn Young was among the county’s most prominent sportsmen and conservationists, the kind of man who headlined sportsmen’s dinners at the Foothill Hotel, and Marvin Lasley was one of the town’s dedicated hunters. Los Gatos was a small place. Their circles did not merely overlap; in a town that size they were practically the same circle.
One last question hangs over the photograph: when exactly was it taken? The museum record says 1931 or 1933, and Peggy Conaway’s 2004 book Los Gatos captions the same image as photographed after snow fell on the town in 1932, a real event that dusted downtown with about half an inch. The early-1930s date is probably right. The snow is another matter. Look at the picture: an upstairs window stands wide open, the garden is in full leaf, and the pale sheen on those pagoda roofs reads like strong sun on light shingles filtered through a soft-focus lens, not melting snow. Whatever day Evelyn Lasley chose, it was mild enough to leave a window open to the air of the hills. The snow may explain why people remembered those winters, but this photograph belongs to a warmer morning, the kind Los Gatos has always been better known for.
The house still stands on Cypress Way, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Youngs are remembered in every account of the town’s past. Thanks to a museum catalog line and a stack of old newspapers, the quiet woman on the other side of the lens can be remembered too.
(Photo: Los Gatos Library local history collection, RES271.)